Looking to add a POP account in Thunderbird? Or want to edit/modify an existing IMAP email account in Thunderbird to POP? Here’s what you should know.
Both IMAP and POP are protocols to receive emails from your servers that offer the emailing services (like Gmail or Outlook.com). They help you give access to your emails from feature-rich desktop clients (like Thunderbird, Apple Mail, Outlook, and so on) instead of bland web-based interfaces. Although, in all honesty, the modern web-based interfaces like Gmail and Outlook.com are getting better and better each day. But desktop clients are still way better for many users and cannot be placed in the same category with web-based clients even if they are getting more functional on a daily basis.
So, through protocols like POP and IMAP, you can send/receive data from servers to your client and vice-versa, making it possible to use advanced email programs.
Both protocols are different and were developed with different mindset and purposes. And before we move forward, it should be clear that POP is now much older, obsolete, and outdated protocol, now that IMAP offers a better way to handle your data.
Without going into much detail, the main difference between them is that IMAP allows real-time syncing between servers and clients, whereas POP doesn’t. So, if you are using IMAP, a change like an email moved to a different folder on the client will also reflect on the servers. But with POP, the data is downloaded to the computer and any changes made do not affect servers.
IMAP is now almost everywhere and is used by everyone.
However, there are still users that need POP as a protocol to downloaded their emails to the clients. Most commonly, POP is used by the users that want to access their emails only from one location, that is, their computer.
So, without further ado, let’s see how to add a POP account to Thunderbird in Mac. Make sure that you have enabled POP in your main email account settings.
How to Configure POP Account in Thunderbird
- – Launch ‘Thunderbird’ –> ‘ToolsEdit’ –> ‘Account Settings’ –> ‘Account Actions’ –> ‘Add Mail Account’
- – Enter your name, your email address, and your password for that email address.
- – Click ‘Continue’ and press ‘Manual Config’ to stop Thunderbird to automatically configure account using IMAP as its default way of adding a new email account.
- – Next, you will get a window for manually adding the details. This bit can be a little overwhelming as you have to find out certain of these settings from your email provider. Here are the fields that you need to enter correctly:
- – Username: Same as your email address before the ‘@’ part
- – Incoming: enter the incoming POP server, usually mail.emailprovider.com or pop.emailprovider.com. For example, for Gmail users, it would be: mail.gmail.com.
- – Select ‘POP’ from the drop down menu
- – Outgoing: enter the outgoing mail POP server address. Usually smtp.domainmame.com
- – Enter the incoming and outgoing port numbers (you have to get these from your email provider)
- – Enter the security details of both incoming and outgoing POP servers (again, depends on your email provider)
- – Click ‘Re-test Configuration’ to see if all the values provided are correct. And Thunderbird can connect with the server successfully. If not, check everything again and make sure there are no mistakes. Most importantly, check with your email provider if it allows POP and enable in the settings.
- – It everything goes well, click ‘Done’ after the re-test is successfully and then create ‘Create Account.’
Congratulations! You have successfully added a new POP email account to your Thunderbird.